Starting Month 3

We're starting our third month with baby Cassie. At her last doctor's appointment, she was 12 pounds, 9 ounces, and 23.5 inches long - putting her in the 90th percentile for both. Since our last post, she has achieved a number of firsts:

• Smile: She now smiles on her own and is close to laughing. She makes cooing and exclamatory noises at things she finds funny.
• Punch: She can visually recognize her toys and is able to reach out and bat at them. Is occasionally able to actually grab a toy of her own accord.
• Sleep: She has started sleeping through the night. She goes to bed at 7pm every night, is waken up at 10:30pm for a feeding, and then has been sleeping from 11pm until 6:30-7:00am in one single stretch.
• Crib: Cassie has graduated from her little bassinet to a big girl crib that John assembled. She seems to really like it and no longer has to sleep on an angle, having grown out of some of the gas and acid problems she has early on.
• Road Trip: We successfully took our first road trip to South Pasadena last weekend to attend our cousin Jasmine's Red Egg and Ginger party. Cassie was a very good girl on the 8 hour car ride down and back, and slept amazingly well in her pack and play while we were at Joe and Yen's house.
• Clothes: Though she just turned two months old, she has effectively grown out of her first set of baby clothes and is now wearing her 3-6 month sized clothing.

As an aside, it has not gone unnoticed that the photo album on our new photo webserver with the professional photo shoot has been hammered with hits. We find this interesting because we thought these pictures were amazing, and yet nobody commented on them when we posted the link on the blog. Hope all you lurkers out there are enjoying the investment we've made to enable your viewing.

New Fileserver

For those of you who are close to us, you know that we tend to be early adopters of technology, especially when there is a clear and present need. Granted, we often recognize that "need" several years before "typical" people do, but our early adoption is almost invariably to meet a need. We have just installed a brand new RAID5 NAS with a total effective capacity of 2 TB. The new 1080i HD camcorder that we got before Cassie was born consumes a massive 8 GB/hour of video recorded, so we almost instantly consumed all of the hard drive resources we had in the house. The new fileserver meets that need, in addition to being an iTunes media server, backing up all of our PCs to a single self-redundant source, and most relevant to all of you...acts as an external photo web server. We're not sure if this will be a permanent host for our images, but we're currently testing out how it works. Long story short, we can now host our images to the entire internet straight from the hard drive that they're stored on. No uploading to Snapfish or Picasa or flickr. The photo albums work like any on-line albums you've seen before, except that all the picture are available in full hi-resolution. So you can download them straight from the source and send them to print on your local printer with no loss of quality. Seriously, does that get any cooler?

Since this blog has been Cassie focused as of late, we've made her pictures available first. Check them out at: http://jbwei.selfip.com/photo/ You don't even have to create an account, they're available to view right away!

Who Let the Dogs Out?

As with many infants, Cassie's hungriest time of day is in the afternoon, typically around 4-5pm. To stay on schedule however, we don't feed her until 6:15pm with a snack only as needed at 5pm. And for the week 8 schedule, we'll be dropping the 5pm feeding altogether. We've discovered an effective way of distracting her until it's time for her evening feeding is rocking out to some music.

Cassie's Photo Shoot

As mentioned in earlier blog posts, Cassie had a photo shoot the other day. Our friend Hawk, who took the amazing pictures for our engagement and wedding, came over to the house and took some picture of us and Cassie. I'm not even going to front, they're stunning. Check them out yourself.